Tag: Storage

Microsoft News – 9 January 2015

3 big announcements from Azure last night plus a useful Hyper-V reporting script feature today.

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

  • Azure Storage to start disabling SSL 3.0 on February 20th, 2015: Protecting against the SSL 3.0 vulnerability. You need TLS 1.0 or higher to continue.
  • Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure: Azure Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using HSMs in the cloud, with ease and at cloud-scale. Furthermore, customers can deploy an encrypted Virtual Machine with CloudLink SecureVM with the master keys in Key Vault. The "Goliath" G-series VMs have gone GA. And an image of a Docker-enabled Ubuntu VM is in the Marketplace.
  • Largest VM in the Cloud: G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.
  • Introducing Docker in Microsoft Azure Marketplace: Microsoft announced the first Ubuntu image fully integrated with the Docker engine available for fast deployment from the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

Security

Windows Server Technical Preview – Replica Support for Hot-Add of VHDX

Shared VHDX was introduced in WS2012 R2 to enable easier and more flexible deployments of guest clusters; that is, a cluster that is made from virtual machines. The guest cluster allows you to make services highly available, because sometimes a HA infrastructure is just not enough (we are supposed to be all about the service, after all).

We’ve been able to do guest clusters with iSCSI, SMB 3.0, or Fiber Channel/FCoE LUNs/shares but this crosses the line between guest/tenant and infrastructure/fabric. That causes a few issues:

  • It reduces flexibility (Live Migration of storage, backup, replication, etc)
  • There’s a security/visibility issue for service providers
  • Self-service becomes a near impossibility for public/private clouds

That’s why Microsoft gave us Shared VHDX. Two virtual machines can connect to the same VHDX that contains data. That disk appears in the guest OS of the two VMs as a shared SAS disk, i.e cluster-supported storage. Now we have moved into the realm of software and we enable easy self service, flexibility, and no longer cross the hardware boundary.

But …

Shared VHDX was a version 1.0 feature in Windows Server 2012 R2. It wasn’t a finished product; Microsoft gave us what they had ready at the time. Feedback was unanimous: we need backup and replications support for Shared HDX, and we’d also like Live Migration support.

The Windows Server vNext Technical Preview gives us support to replicate Shared VHDX files using Hyper-V Replica (HVR). This means that you can add these HA guest clusters to your DR replication set(s) and offer a new level of availability to your customers.

I cannot talk about how Microsoft is accomplishing this feature yet … all I can report is what I’ve seen announced.

Microsoft News – 6 January 2015

A few little nuggets to get you back in the swing of things. And yes, I have completely ignored the US-only version 1.2 Azure Pricing Tool that suffers from “The Curse of Zune”.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

Azure

Microsoft News – 2 January 2015

Welcome to the “Happy New Year 2015” edition of my Microsoft News posts. I hope you have a nice time off from work – it FLEW by for me; I could do with a holiday to recover from my holiday.

Here’s the news from over the past week or so:

Hyper-V

Windows Server

  • VPN Interoperability guide for Windows Server 2012 R2: This document covers the working configurations for some of the popular third party VPN devices that can be deployed to work with Windows Server 2012 R2 VPN. The configuration for a Windows gateway is also included to server as a guideline for an interoperable deployment with the third party devices.

Azure

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 19 December 2014

We’re getting close to Christmas and Microsoft is starting to wind down for the year. Here’s a mostly-Azure report for the last few days.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 12 December 2014

It’s December, the month when Microsoft employees normally head away for a long vacation and nothing much happens. Or so we thought. Azure went wild last night, releasing loads of new features either into preview or GA. Oh yeah, loads of December updates from Microsoft have problems.

Windows Client

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Azure

Miscellaneous

Introducing The Features of Hyper-V In Windows Server 2016 (WS2016)

As I have done with Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2, I am going to do my best to list out and document (level 100 to begin with) the features of Windows Server 2016 (WS2016) Hyper-V.

There will be two levels of “documentation”:

  • The glossary: Where I list out each feature, summarize it, and link to more detailed descriptions.
  • Feature specific posts: Where I will talk a bit more about the feature in question.

The glossary will grow over time and I will add links as feature specific posts are published. I have a bunch of those feature specific posts scheduled daily from today into 2015 covering content on Hyper-V and related technologies in Windows Server. The feature specific posts will take more time – things are subject to change so I am waiting for stabilization first.

Note that I am aggregating publicly discussed/document information from TechNet, Microsoft blog posts, TechEd Europe 2014, Ignite 2015 and interviews by Microsoft staff. There is no content beyond that scope.

Microsoft News – 3 December 2014

It’s been a slow period but there’s some interesting stuff in Azure networking and websites.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 24 November 2014

It’s been a slow few news days in the Microsoft world. Stuff I’m not linking to: the infinitely linked webcasts on mobility management and the Reign malware infecting computers in Ireland, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 20 November 2014

There are a lot of upset people because of (1) the Azure outage and (2) how Microsoft communicated during the outage. We had a couple of affected customers. The only advice I can give to Microsoft is:

  1. Don’t deploy your updates to everything at the same time.
  2. Now you know how customers feel when bad updates are issued. Bring back complete testing.
  3. Communicate clearly during an issue – that includes sending emails to affected customers. You’ve got monitoring systems & automation – use them. Heck, you even blogged about how (Azure) Automation could be used by customers to trigger actions.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous